2014

Tonight we celebrate our Eighth Aggrochat Game Club game, Tron 2.0. What makes this week so interesting is the fact that this is a game from 2003. For a point of reference this is the year that the original Call of Duty was released, as well as the PC port of Knights of the Old Republic. This is an era when the Quake 3 engine still reigned as the king of all shooters, and people were branching out to do some interesting things with the FPS model. The results of this week are a bit mixed, and represents the first time we had a few people reach rage quit moments. Listen into the show to see how our group fared and some of the commentary we have about this interesting title.

This week we had Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Thalen. Tam was jet setting around the country but should be back next week. It seems pretty insane that this is already our 75th show. Being our Diamond Jubilee of a sort I am swapping up our introduction a bit in an effort to make it easier to see precisely what games we happen to talk about on a given show. Without further delay here are the games we discussed this week on AggroChat.

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

Tonight we are recovering a bit from recording two mega episodes, and end up crafting a relatively short one. Since the last episode three of our hosts have been to Pax Prime and as you might expect have an awful lot of things to talk about. Ashgar, Tam and Kodra share their experiences, and some of the interesting games that they got to see. Additionally there was a pretty awesome meet up of folks from the blogosphere in Seattle and there is some discussion of that. In the meantime many of us have also managed to get sucked into Diablo 3 for Season 4. So we have been spending quite a bit of time stalking the Prime Evil, and grouping together to tackle the content.